Mobila moln

The criteria that companies use to pick a site keep evolving, says Mike\nManos, Microsoft's director of data centres. His team feeds 35 sets of\ndata into an electronic \"heat\" map of the world. With colours that\nrange from green to red, it shows where conditions are favourable and\nwhich places should be avoided. And Microsoft needs a lot of choice: if\na new service suddenly becomes popular, it needs to be able to increase\ncomputing capacity quickly. That is also why it uses shipping\ncontainers pre-loaded with up to 2,000 servers, which can be up and\nrunning within hours. In the firm's Chicago data centre, over 200 such\ncontainers will populate an entire floor.